Woody Guthrie's Legacy

   When I was an apprentice learning to cut timber frames I lived in western Massachusetts in the Berkshires.  The Berkshires are kind of like the Green Mountains of Vermont, where I am from, except they are smaller and the dense trees and lack of scale feel isolating.  For this reason everything feels very hidden, like you won't find what you are looking for unless you stumble across it or someone takes you there.

   There is a strange lesser-known establishment three or four turns down a long dirt road called the Dream-Away Lodge.  It used to be a brothel, but today is some combination of up-scale restaurant/lounge and local bonfire hangout for the few who have been led there.  To be served at the bar, creative drink names may require you to ask the bar tender - 'Can you make me a dirty girl?"  There was nothing that felt like it wasn't unique, and it didn't take long to feel like I knew everyone there.  In one room were simply an array of couches and chairs with pillows to rest in and catch up with friends, and this room doubled as a low-key music venue.  Wednesday nights were sing-along open mic nights, and everyone showed up with instruments and voices for the jam.   

   Pictures on the walls recalled in-house performances by famous musicians who would stop in on their way between New York City and Boston for a meal and familiar company.  Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, James Taylor.  I suppose the Dreamaway Lodge was a good place to lay low and recharge between cities.  One night when I was there Ramblin' Jack Elliot and Arlo Guthrie were having dinner just a few tables over, but no body acted like they noticed.  Something about the place felt like magic, or at least like I had been shown some special secret.

   One summer Wednesday, like many other summer Wednesdays I brought my guitar along to play along.  We would sit in the room with couches and go around the circle, taking turns singing songs.  Known and unknown, skilled and unskilled, folk and rock and blues.  Without prompt and whether they really knew the song or not, others would join right in.  My solo act would be backed by a bass, another guitar, backup singers, and maybe a banjo.  The group changed every week.  One night while starting Bob Dylan's 'Tangled Up In Blue' and a woman walked up and started singing along with me.  I was sitting and she was standing next to me bouncing a baby girl on her hip.  Her voice was beautiful and so familiar.  I didn't actually know until well after we finished the song that I was singing along with Sarah Lee Guthrie, Woody's granddaughter.  And she was bouncing his great-granddaughter to the beat of my version of a song he had inspired.  In a minor but meaningful way, I had stumbled directly into the path of the lineage and history of one very important vein of American folk music.  

Happy 100th Birthday Woody.